Now this is old Florida: Daytona Beach, 1904. More than six decades later, Daytona occasionally beckoned me, especially during Spring Break, a rockin’ happening then but sedate compared to today’s debauched version. The Daytona Beach of my memory, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was overcrowded, the sands jammed with cars, and Highway A1A just beyond the dunes trampled with the schlocky glitz so oddly alluring to tourists. My high school friends and I were more drawn to the reserved and scenic New Smyrna Beach, where we ended up more weekends than not.
Who among the crowd pictured above (and much larger here) could have imagined what the seashore on which they stroll would become? Maybe I’m drawn to photographs like this because they so starkly illuminate the futures we can never behold.
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